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Used Round Door / Square Door Safes

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In past years a particular type of two-door commercial safe was common in grocery stores. A large fire rated compartment, for cash register trays and paper work, had a big square door. This compartment was usually on the bottom.

Large amounts of cash, like the day’s bank deposits, were kept in a small top compartment, which usually had a small round door. This high security money chest (usually TL rated) has a heavy plate steel body which is encased in about 200# of concrete.

ROUND SQUARE DOOR 003ROUND SQUARE DOOR 006

A single outer steel skin encloses both safes into a single unit. If the money chest is on top the units are top heavy and tricky to move. Weight requires these double units to be placed on concrete floors.

These units fell out of favor about twenty years ago because the high security compartment is too small. In addition, it is difficult to fit round doors with electronic locks. Stores seldom want these safes anymore, so that creates an opportunity for homeowners: Used round door /square door safes are readily available at safe shops for reasonable prices. Protect your personal papers from fire in the fire rated lower part, while your cash, silver and gold is safe from burglars in the high security money chest.

Gun Safes Make Great Christmas Gifts, But . . .

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Gun safes make terrific Christmas gifts provided that the unit selected is appropriate for the recipient’s needs. That can be a problem, however, because the well-intended purchaser often does not appreciate the differences in quality, and they may not know about everything the user will store in the safe. The buyer is usually a girl friend or wife who is buying an expensive gift for her man. Understandably, she is focused on price because even a cheap gun safe is a big purchase.

Big box stores take full advantage of this situation with Black Friday sales and Christmas sales. They sell thousands of cheap Chinese units which, to the person who doesn’t do proper research, appear to be suitable. The result can be that the gun owner ends up with a safe he would not buy for himself. It might not offer the protection he knows he should have. While truly appreciating the thought behind his present, he may have unspoken doubts about using it. It’s a difficult gift to return. We have all been there with one gift or another.

So here are my suggestions:

  • Don’t buy a gun safe as a surprise. Talk about it in advance. Get his input about brand, size, and value of what he will use it for.
  • Be wary of Black Friday and Christmas sales.
  • Don’t buy only, or primarily, based on price.
  • Don’t buy a Chinese product.
  • Both parties should learn the basics about gun safes, the differences in brands and models. A good place to start is by reading my earlier posts about gun safes, safe locks, etc.
  • Buy from a legitimate safe store, not a gun store or big box. Your research time will be well spent talking directly with safe experts who actually service different brands.
  • If cost of a good unit is too high, then agree that this gift will be for Christmas and his birthday, or this Christmas and next, or have him pitch in on the cost, or get his family to contribute.

Honestly, a quality gun safe is a gift he will actually use and remember for years, even if he has to help with the cost. But the memory will be less positive if it is one of those gifts that he would secretly prefer to return for something better.

Used High Security Safes for Silver and Gold

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Tom’s two general rules about safe prices: 1) You can get fire protection relatively cheap or you can get burglary resistance relatively cheap, but the price of both fire and burglary will be relatively high; 2) Good quality used safes will save you a significant amount of money.

Here is a scenario we see often: A couple has been gradually (or suddenly) converting much of their personal wealth into silver and gold, to protect their life savings from a financial market collapse. They also want to prevent the government from knowing too much about their business. But they want to buy a cheap safe. They want to store a large portion of their life savings in a “garage sale price” safe. That doesn’t make sense. And they usually are more concerned about fire than break-in, so they buy a fire safe.

Plate steel safes 023Plate steel safes 029

If you buy coins with numismatic value, or it they are in plastic cases or presentation boxes, then fire and smoke protection is important. But if you are just buying rounds, bars or bulk silver coins I recommend a used plate steel high security unit. A used safe with 1” or 1 ½” of solid steel on the door and a “TL” rating will get you outstanding burglary resistance at a reasonable price. It is extremely unlikely that your metals would melt in a safe that did not have fire protection because the melting points are high. Following are melting temps for typical investment grade metals.

Gold, 24K                     1945 F
Silver, pure                  1761 F
Silver, coin                  1615 F
Silver, sterling             1640 F

The used safe shown on the left is small, 10 x 12 x 16, perfect for hiding under a cardboard box in a closet.  But it has a TL-15 rating and it weighs 250#!  Steel on the front is 2″ thick and the rest is 1″ thick.  The other unit is 22 x 22 x 25, a TL-15 rated safe with a 1 1/2″ solid steel door  — it weighs 910#.  These units are great for low volume/high value contents like silver or gold.

Buy Your Gun Safe from a Local Dealer, Not Online

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Someone asked about “Reason #4” in the last post, “Internet sellers usually do not know as much about gun safes and vault doors as a good local dealer . . .” Here is why that is true.

Internet sellers offer no service. They show a picture of a safe, a brief description, the price, “click here to add to cart”, and it gets dropped off outside your home. They may have inventory or it may be drop shipped from the factory.  But they don’t learn the products intimately.

A good safe company/dealer will work with the gun safes and vaults on a whole different level. Local safe companies are the people who see the safes after a fire or burglary attempt — the internet sellers don’t. Local dealers see which units survive or fail in a fire. We know which locks are prone to failure because our technicians are the ones that open safes when locks quit working. We know which safes are easy to drill or pry open, which ones have effective relockers, which ones have effective “hardplate”, which ones have drywall insulation that is pieced together from construction scraps, etc. Local safe businesses are the people who go out to perform warranty work, not the online seller.

Occasionally, we hear people’s anger when they discover that the safe they bought online was misrepresented. Pictures on a website may look good, but poor quality is more apparent when the safe shows up in your driveway. Disappointment is especially common with vault doors purchased online. A local business is likely to be more truthful because they have a hometown reputation to protect.

The product knowledge issue also applies to gun stores that sell gun safes as a sideline. If they do not have real safe technicians with the ability to service safes, they just do not have the same knowledge that a safe company has.

Buy your safe locally from a full service safe and vault business!

Top 10 Reasons Not To Buy a Gun Safe Over the Internet

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Top 10 Reasons Why You Should Not Buy a Gun Safe Over the Internet

“Top 10” lists are very popular since David Letterman used them every day on his show. Here is mine:

#10 Internet sellers do not support your local economy. You should support your local main street type businesses.

#9 Internet sellers usually do not arrange to have the gun safe installed in your home.

#8 Internet sellers certainly will not come to your home to service your safe.

#7 When purchasing a safe over the internet you cannot see it and “kick the tires” before you buy it.

#6 Most internet sellers specialize in selling cheap, inferior, Chinese made (junk) safes. This often leads to #5.

#5 Internet sellers frequently misrepresent what they are selling.

#4 Internet sellers usually do not know as much about gun safes and vault doors as a good local dealer, and the local dealer can show you side-by-side comparisons between different units.

#3 Internet sellers are disgusting, good-for-nothing, miserable excuses for human beings, whose mothers abandoned them at an early age down by the railroad tracks. Haha.

#2 Things can get messy, and buyers tend to get angry, when they find problems with their new safe after it is unpackaged and the delivery truck has already left.

#1 How do you know that the delivery driver, or someone else in the freight system, has not removed the box from your safe long enough to write down the combination? And the address to your home is on the outside of the box!

I probably exaggerated on #3, but the other points are real concerns – these things really happen!